Hometown Days
Will it or won’t it?
As of this week, the odds of Verona having a festival the second weekend of June look good. But unlike in years past, it’s anything but automatic.

No matter what happens, the nonprofit, all-volunteer festival known as Hometown Days is gone, having voted itself out of existence in October when members of Verona Community Betterment could not find people willing to take prime leadership roles to make the festival happen.

For years, most of the responsibility for planning and execution has landed on a handful of people, and new members are few. So facing another year like that, last year’s group decided to shut down and hope for an alternative.

Two months later, Verona businessman Brad Zaugg, who had bought the folded women’s magazine Brava two years earlier, was ready to announce he was ready to make a run at keeping the festival alive. The catch was that any profits would go to the magazine and its parent company, which also puts on three expo events a year.

Some argue there’s nothing wrong with that – after all, a professional coordinator such as what the Optimists briefly considered hiring would take a salary in much the same way. And in fact, Zaugg’s plan involves the same community groups in essentially the same way as before.
But whether the community can accept such an arrangement remains to be seen.

After all, Hometown Days has always been an event where people who might otherwise make plans for the week stop by and chip in, partly out of a sense of community and camaraderie, partly out of a sense of duty toward charities that have helped make the community what it is.

Betterment alone pumped more than $100,000 back into the community over the past decade, funding Welcome to Verona signs, helping the Harriet Park shelter get built and contributing to large projects for the fire department and senior center.

But Betterment is no more, and after 40 years, Hometown Days is still not a certainty.